Pretty sure he would have gotten very similar output just by saying "generate a random game using Godot and c#" but that wouldn't make for a viral post so instead he asked the model to pretend meaningless input is being used by it and added a dog in the process of writing such input because that helps the virality of the whole thing.
The AI cannot drive meaning from the dog's input because there's no useful information encoded in there. It's effectively a random string (if there's less randomness, it's just because it's a dog's paw physically pressing on a keyboard).
All the relevant information was in the initial prompt and the scaffolding. The dog was not even /dev/random, it was simply a trigger to "give it another go".
The shapes of clouds and positions of stars are essentially random, and yet humans derive meaning from both. I agree you could have gotten the same results via /dev/random, or probably by increasing the temperature on the model, but I suspect doing one of those things is important.
The shapes of clouds and positions of stars aren't completely random; there is useful information in them, to varying degrees (e.g. some clouds do look like, say, a rabbit, enough that a majority of people will agree). The mechanism at play here with the LLM is completely different; the connection between two dog-inputs and the resulting game barely exists, if at all. Maybe the only signal is "some input was entered, therefore the user wants a game".
If you could have gotten the same result with any input, or with /dev/random, then effectively no useful information was encoded in the input. The initial prompt and the scaffolding do encode useful information, however, and are the ones doing the heavy lifting; the article admits as much.
> If you could have gotten the same result with any input, or with /dev/random, then effectively no useful information was encoded in the input.
It's not that the input contained useful information—obviously it does not—it's that it's causing the output to be more random, and thus more "creative".
Without the gibberish, "generate a random game" would likely repeatedly surface high-probability concepts—platformers, space shooters, tower defense—whatever sits near the top of the model's prior distribution for "game." The gibberish causes the model to land on concepts like "frog" that it would almost never reach otherwise.
I actually knew a Jehovah kid who wasn't allowed to celebrate birthdays. Actually pretty sad because as you know such events are ingrained into almost every culture- there were children from all over the world at this school and they all sang happy birthday in 30 languages.
I know a number of Jehovah's Witnesses children - I don't want to call their children 'Jehovah' since they have not made the choice to be born in those circumstances - who also don't celebrate birthdays but notices they have other 'gift-giving' days which seem to fill the hole left by the missing birthdays. Just like Jews manage to get around the rules for Sabbath by installing special light switches [1] which use random events to accidentally switch on and off the lights so the one who actuated the mechanism did not have someone or something do work for them also Jehovah's Witnesses seem to find ways to get around the restrictions their traditions put on them.
Of course education could help about this and other psychologically manipulative tactics by corps but such kind of education is heavily frowned upon for being seeing as anti-capitalist and (more propagandistic) as un-american, so there is zero of such kind of education.
Education doesn’t help here, what are you talking about?!
Educated people can read as many books as they want about manipulation and still be susceptible to it. The manipulation works on a much deeper emotional level. We can’t change who we are, no matter how much education we get.
Being told by a brand “you’re fat” hurts no matter how many papers you’ve read or published and “you’re still thin and beautiful and desirable!” feels amazing.
Thankfully, for most people on Earth, the prospect of seeming "Un-American" is not relevant. It's also not a problem to argue against free-market economies - see Austria's second biggest city (Graz), which has an elected mayor from the communist party.
In the same way an adult is responsable for "picking" the religion they believe in, the one that it was imposed upon them by their parents during their childhood.
Viewing this thread, and the back and forth of it, I need to say something.
Advertising sucks in this thread too.
By that I mean, people are not speaking plainly, and it is almost ingrained into our societies now. We "sell" our position in a discussion, a debate.
For example, regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.
However, lack of regulation can harm people. Significantly.
Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.
In democratic nations, often judges will weigh these two things, when determining if a regulation passes the muster. In my country, we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and often judges will determine if a challenged regulation is of sufficient, required public good, whilst not overtly reducing freedom of the individual.
This is a mature conversation.
Advertising is not.
A primary example I've seen in the US, is people calling immigrants "undocumented" on one side, and "criminals" on the other. This is, of course, a reduction in nuance, and designed to advertise a position merely with the words used. And it is a societal sickness.
An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.
There was a time when politics were not first and fore in terms of the use of language. The current trend to be "touchy feely" over use of language, and find great offense at the use of language, does nothing other than stop debate. Reduce discussion. Cause schism instead of collaboration.
>Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.
If there were no regulation against someone picking you up off the street and chaining you up in their basement, they would be more free in this scenario and you would be less free. You might be able to say regulation can curtail freedom and at the same time increase freedom.
>An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.
Well, it also has a connotation just like the other words. "Illegal" and "alien" both evoke meaning that goes beyond the specific condition, and that phrase was generally the predecessor of "criminals" in this example. Those who use different terms are also incentivized to convince others that their chosen word is the one that is most "simply fact" and not "touchy feely" language.
> Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.
When I say regulation is freedom, I'm borrowing from dialectics. The only way we figured out how to move forward is to leave something behind.
So when you see regulation, the absence of a given right, let's say to carry a deadly weapon in public, you have to see this is the tailend of the synthesis of a long debate, where we agreed that the risks of arming the population outweighs the benefits of self protection.
So regulation is freedom because freedom is choice, and to choose is to leave something behind. Regulation is just the manifestation of the consequences of that choice.
Completely fair, but I was responding to someone who doesn't think that it curtails freedom but that is the total opposite, you cannot be free if you are dead (except for a few niche philosophical definitions of the word), so human centric regulations like the asbestos ban are orthogonal to freedom, even if I admit in the strictest definition of the word yes, a regulation can curtail your freedom to harm yourself and hypothetically could curtail yourself from positive benefits as well.
But the thing is that statistically the likelihood they were discussing in good faith about this is near none, instead their way of speaking are telltales of a libertarian, where they have a almost religious believe that regulation is their biggest enemy and will never admit that the lack of it could harm or even kill them, I have wasted many many hours talking with such kind of people and don't aim to waste more arguing in good faith giving nuanced responses.
What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.
"It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."
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